A no-name thrift store purse sold for $192,000 while vintage garment quality is degrading amid the fast fashion boom.
Estelle Getty found the purse at a thrift store in Los Angeles’ Fairfax District when she was auditioning for the role of Sophia Petrillo in “The Golden Girls.” It is beige woven straw, beaded in white plastic along rigid double handles, with no designer marked anywhere on it, and she carried it through all seven seasons of the show. On Aug. 12 it sold at Julien’s Auctions for $192,000, nearly 13 times its $15,000 high estimate and almost 21 times the $9,150 it brought at Bonhams in 2009.
“Whoever wants it is gonna have to pay heavy money for it,” Getty told Rosie O’Donnell in 1996. “Putting down the purse is like putting down your life.”
The winning bidder asked to stay anonymous. “I’m just a girl from West Virginia who is a huge ‘Golden Girls’ fan,” she said. “I used to watch it with my grandma all the time and with my friend group growing up. I have always wanted to own that purse, and I have a fake one my boyfriend bought me, as well as a lot of ‘Golden Girls’ memorabilia. I even have a ‘Golden Girls’ tattoo on my arm.”
Straw and plastic, four decades old, and still intact enough to photograph for a catalog. The same can’t be said for other thrifted items.
“The grade in vintage has changed a lot,” Eibhleann McMahon, creative director of the London vintage chain Rokit, told FashionUnited. “As it’s returned to market once, twice, even three times, it’s dying off.” Rokit turns 40 in September, runs four stores in London and one in Cardiff, and buys most of its stock from a single textile recycling operation in Canada. McMahon dates the drop in quality to what happened after the era that produced Sophia’s handbag.
“Man-made fibres became worse, everything became cheaper, the fashion juggernaut became out of control, the repetition of trends and the speed at which they were produced was crazy,” she said. “Whilst it had become easier for resellers in a window of maybe the last decade, it’s now starting to become more difficult because the people they’re buying off can sell themselves.”
McMahon says they’re sitting on “mountains” of product and that the industry has to collaborate in a bid to solve this issue because “it’s only going to get worse,” she said. “We can put it back to market as is, or we have to find new ways of reworking it or completely disassembling it.”
Rokit says it sets itself apart from platforms like Vinted because of quality control measures like accurate descriptions, product vetting, and professional photography. “We’re not dealing with huge markups, not like your traditional fashion model. Our markups are relatively small because we put a lot into the processing.”
Vestiaire Collective has spent the past year on the same problem at scale. “We have been profitable for several months,” Rémi Bouchez, chief technology officer at Vestiaire Collective, told FashionUnited.
“We were too slow until now,” said Thomas Hézard, who became chief product officer four months ago alongside Bouchez under new chief executive Bernard Osta. The two halved the number of projects running in parallel and halved the time it takes to release a feature. Most of what they released changes how a garment is described. Vestiaire now enhances seller photographs automatically, and items that go through it show more than 5 percent higher liquidity. A second tool reads brand, material, color, and model from a single photo and cuts listing time from five minutes to one.
“We rework the background removal, lighting and shadows, without ever altering the actual condition of the product. There is obviously no question of making a defect disappear,” Bouchez said.
Roughly 15 million garments from the global North arrive every week at the Kantamanto Market in Accra. Retailers buy them in bales, each a nearly three-foot brick of compressed clothing weighing at least 120 pounds and costing between $200 and $700, and they buy them sealed. Fewer than 20 percent might turn a profit on one.
“It’s like gambling,” Abena Essoun, community outreach coordinator at The Or Foundation and a former Kantamanto retailer, told Sourcing Journal. “You’re always owing, always in debt. You’re always thinking of the money you’re spending on the bale. The moment you open the bale, your blood pressure goes up.”
“These are literally unsellable items,” said Yayra Agbofah, a former Kantamanto trader who founded the design initiative The Revival. “The used clothing trade isn’t profit-making anymore. It has become a debt-accruing business.”
“The truth is that from the U.K., Ghana gets good product,” Ian Newton, managing director of ELT Global, told the publication. “We don’t give Ghana rubbish. Every single thing that gets touched, if it’s ripped, damaged or smells, gets chucked away.”
Peru’s Observatory for Combating Illicit Trade published a study on Aug. 13 describing the illegal used clothing trade there as a chain of 11 links, 32 activities, and 88 tasks, with 24 points at which the clothes end up as environmental waste, Sourcing Journal reported. Shipments enter South America through Chile and cross into Peru by cargo truck, bus, unauthorized crossing, and lake routes over Titicaca.
“There isn’t one route exclusively for used clothing, another for illegal gold and another for drug trafficking. They all share corridors and logistics operators,” Nicolás Zevallos, director of public affairs at the Institute of Criminology, said in a statement.
“Oversupply and overproduction are at the root of the issue, and the industry shows no real acknowledgement of this, and certainly no commitments toward displacement targets,” said Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The Or Foundation.
“Are there no good clothes in Europe?” Gloria Amposah, a Kantamanto retailer, asked the reporter.
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